Child Marriage in an International Frame

Mary E. John is Professor at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, India. She was Director of the Centre from 2006-2012 and before that the Deputy Director of the Women’s Studies Programme at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India from 2001-2006. Recent publications include Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories (New edition, 2021); A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (co-edited 1998); Women’s Studies in India: A Reader (2008) and the co-edited volume Women in the Worlds of Labour: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Perspectives (in press).

“With her characteristic brilliance and perspicacity, Mary E. John makes a signal contribution to feminist scholarship in this book. Her genealogy of child marriage draws upon historical, comparative, and intersecting analytical frameworks. This deep and nuanced contextualization compels us to consider afresh what we had long assumed we knew about a familiar subject. Her argument about "compulsory marriage," which she introduces to reframe the discussion of child marriage, offers an important conceptual advance that will likely become a valuable new resource in the feminist toolkit. This is one of the most original and exciting feminist interventions to come along in a while.” — Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA“This elegantly incisive book by Mary E. John, one of India’s leading feminist scholars, challenges us to interrogate some of the myths of reason and progress that we complacently live by. Her object of study is public discourse and social policy on the issue of child marriage, a ‘social problem’ which, for close on two centuries, has been an object of attention by Indian social reformers, women’s movement activists, and latterly, in a global context, by international development agencies. In a tour de force, John decodes the intricacies of various data sets and the assumptions that drive them, to suggest that it is not child-marriage that is the problem for Indian women, but rather the ‘compulsory’ nature of marriage itself which must be the frame of reference for genuine change.” — Patricia Uberoi, Retired Professor, Institute of Economic Growth & Chairperson, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, India

• Introduction. 1. Historical Soundings: India 1800–2000 2. Elements of the International Story and the Question of Concepts 3. Child Marriage in the New Millennium: Law, Policy and the Work of Demography 4. Reintegrating the ‘Other’: Age, Education, Work under Compulsory Marriage. Afterword. Appendix